Wendy Lowe (wlowe@tecsult.com)
Wed, 28 Jul 1999 12:49:46 -0400
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1999 12:49:46 -0400 From: Wendy Lowe <wlowe@tecsult.com> Subject: Re: Is teaching learnable only through experience?
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I've been perusing the exchange about learning teaching (and vice versa). As a former teacher
and a training professional now, I know the difficulty of designing learning for a classroom
and trying to make it experiential, the constraints of training programmes and the time factor
for internships, etc....
But teaching is something else: some part of this skill is learned through experience, without
doubt. Some part can be improved by methods courses and workshops (I had one professor who
used the same overheads for twenty years: he would rub out words on one with his thumb and
write in another one over the smear; I guess you could have called them process actetates).
But when I see children and adolescents work and play together I am convinced that much of
what makes a teacher, an explainer, a mentor, is somehow inborn.
Muhammad Betz's latest posting makes a lot of sense to me in that respect. I am just as
convinced that it is possible to work at teaching skills, but some of us find it natural and
others will never.
Wendy Lowe
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